Exploring Alt-Alphabetic Texts and Creative-Critical Scholarship

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In episode 6 of Masters of Text, Ames presents the first part of a three-section piece called “The New Work of Reading,” an experimental audio-autoethnographic piece in which she examines her own process of learning to read multimodal scholarship. This episode also features the third segment of our S. Project, a dialogue that focuses on what we thought about Chapters 4, 5, and 6 of S.. by J.J. Abrahams and Doug Dorst. As an interlude, Trauman offers a spotlight on a couple of texts he recommends our listeners check out.

Episode 5 begins with a segment in which Trauman reflects on how he employs an historical understanding of technologies as a central part of his textual design process. It’s pretty much the theoretical background for his design approach for conceptualizing the table of contents of the edited collection: The New Work of Composing. In the second half of the episode, Ames and Trauman discuss a couple of audio editors that are absolutely outstanding for producing audio texts, soundwriting, or podcast episodes. The episodes wraps up by encouraging listeners to attend the Computers & Writing conference this summer in Rochester, NY. The proposal deadline is this Friday, October 23rd!

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In this segment, Trauman interviews Ames about how and why it was she turned her written piece, “An Open Letter to Gurlesque” (which you can hear in Episode 3) into an audio text. Conversation ranges from discussion of the ways that two fonts on the page come alive through the voices of Ames and Arielle Greenberg, to Ames’s attempt at writing queer theory, to the ways that visual aspects of text such as footnotes become invisible in a recording. Ames ends by imagining at least one future iteration for the piece as an ASL video.

In this episode, Ames and Trauman continue their conversation about Abrams and Dorst’s novel, S. after reading the first quarter of the book. They find that’s is fascinating. And damn difficult reading. And totally worth it. The second half of the show is Ames’s text: “An Open Letter to Gurlesque.” It’s smart, racy, and beautiful. No doubt a “must-listen.”

In this episode, Ames and Trauman discuss a course they taught together this year. It combined writing, digital storytelling, and art activism. Also, Ames reflects on making an audio text as a present for her mom’s 70th birthday.

In this episode, you meet us, the two hosts of the show, Ames Hawkins and Ryan Trauman. We talk a little about our backgrounds, how we met, and how this podcast came into being. In the second half of the episode, we discuss our first encounter with S., a novel by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. But the book is also a fascinating experiment with storytelling and “book-ness.”